


Unstable

by BerryBagel



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Crack, F/M, Humor, My loving crack tribute to this truly fantastic AU concept, Rich Arya, Stablemaster Gendry, brief discussion of stab wound recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-16 01:19:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19307731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BerryBagel/pseuds/BerryBagel
Summary: Looks like Arya's stuck home alone all summer, with only the company of the new stablemaster.  WHATEVER will she do?





	Unstable

The worst part about getting stabbed is that now Arya can't go to the beach.

 

Okay, no.  The worst part about getting stabbed was getting stabbed.  Obviously. It should go without saying that a knife to the lower ribs was, by default, the low point of Arya’s June.

 

But Arya doesn't want to undersell how disappointing it is to see the whole family pile into cars and trundle off for the yearly summer vacation without her.  Robb is riding shotgun in Jon’s pickup. Robb better recognize that next year, that's  _ her _ seat again.

 

They'll be back in August.  It's better this way, actually.  The amount of familial concern Arya has been receiving these last few weeks?  Almost smothering. Sansa really jumped at the chance for some captive sisterly bonding.  Arya has learned to knit this past week, almost entirely against her will. Even Jon keeps scooting around to make sure she doesn't need more aspirin, or a blanket, or a cup of tea.  Arya wasn't this weird about it when  _ Jon _ got stabbed, and that was actually way more serious.

 

So she had encouraged the family not to reschedule the Braavos trip.  They wouldn’t have been able to reschedule it anyways, really. Dad would've gotten busy with something at work again, and it would've just ended up cancelled.  Her family can have their vacation. Arya will stay at home and luxuriate in some peace and quiet.

 

It's been three hours since they all left.  Arya is already bored out of her skull. No one’s around.  There's nothing to do, alone. This is why she goes to school in the city, come to think of it.  She can't even default to going for a run, because she's  _ not supposed to overexert herself _ .  Thanks, Dr.Crane.  Maybe she'll have a nice, relaxing walk.  That would be fine, probably.

 

The summer staff haven't come in yet, so Arya is totally alone in Winterfell.  It's just her, her thoughts, and fifty rooms of antique dark oak furniture. Maybe she'll fuck around with the dumbwaiter.  Mom said not to touch it, but Arya thinks it'd be pretty easy to turn it into a secret passage. Any self-respecting old house needs at least one secret passage.

 

* * *

Arya can hear something stomping around outside.  Her initial guess is that it's a bear going through the trash.  She goes to check it out. In retrospect, going outside to see if there's a bear in the driveway is probably not the safest maneuver.  It's not a bear, though, so she's fine.

 

There's a guy in work boots clomping around and trying to open the garage door.  He's big. Heavily muscled, dark hair. It's a shame that someone so good looking would turn to a life of crime.

 

Arya took two aspirin with her breakfast, so she's pretty much on an anti-inflammatory high right now.  She feels like she could take him. She clears her throat loudly in his general direction.

 

The guy turns in surprise, but, to his dubious credit, does not immediately bolt.  He vaguely gestures to the garage door handle and scowls. The garage used to be a stable, so the door opens out instead of up like a normal sliding garage door.  Arya isn't sure if this guy thinks it's her fault that he's too stupid to break into her garage.

 

“What are you doing?” She asks.

 

“I'm Gendry.” He says, which is an answer to a question she did not, in fact, ask.

 

Arya looks at him, and tries to appear as intimidating as possible.  He blinks back at her with a sense of self-righteousness seldom seen in garage burglars.

 

“I'm the new stablemaster.” He finally says.  It's a weird, yet undeniably creative, choice of lies.  There is, of course no stable.

 

“There's no stable.” She tells him.

 

“Is this not a stable?” He asks, trying the garage handle again.

 

“I mean, it used to be.” She says.  “But we don't have any horses.”

 

The guy looks at her in disbelief.  “This is Winterfell, right?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“I thought Winterfell was the name of a town.”

 

“Just a big house.” She says.

 

“Big house...this is one turret short of being a castle.” Gendry says, looking up at the three stories of Victorian construction towering above them.  “Anyways, that's why I'm late.”

 

“Ah.” Arya says.  Maybe he actually  _ is _ here to do a legitimate job.  But there's not a stable here, so, practically, it doesn't really matter that he's late.

 

“Okay, well.  If there's no stable, and there's no horses, you know anyone who lives here?”

 

“I live here.” She says.

 

Gendry’s eyes go wide and he takes a perceptible step back.  “Sorry...ma’am?”

 

Arya stands there in her pajamas and rolls her eyes at him.

 

“I don't know how to address people who live in castles.  M’lady?” He offers, more sarcastically than his current employment probably warrants.

 

“ _ Arya _ is fine.”

 

“Arya, then.  What's the word on the nonexistent horses I've been hired to care for?”

 

Arya considers.  She's not sure which one of her family members accidentally hired this guy.  It'd be easy enough to send him away. That's what Luwin, the head of the household staff, would probably do.  Gendry doesn't seem particularly punctual, or well-prepared, or polite, or even necessarily particularly friendly.  But he is really,  _ really _ hot.

 

“The horses are definitely nonexistent.  But we keep the cars in there. You could wash them.” She suggests.

 

* * *

Arya still can't be totally sure Gendry isn't just a burglar who came up with a good cover story.  Well, a mediocre to poor cover story. Mostly it's his commitment to the concept that has her convinced he's telling the truth.  But she figures that, just to be on the safe side, she should probably supervise his work.

 

“This is actually great,” Gendry is saying.  “I don't know shit about horses.”

 

Gendry probably doesn't need to be shirtless to soap down Robb’s BMW.  It's not  _ that _ warm.  Today is overcast and cloudy.  This whole car-cleaning thing is probably going to be an exercise in futility when it rains in a few hours, anyways.

 

But Arya isn't complaining, and it's not like she made him do it.  She just provided the sponge and the bucket of soapy water. When she got back, the shirt was off.

 

“Who even hired you?” She asks.  Gendry shrugs.

 

“I just answered a newspaper ad.  It was all on the phone.”

 

Gendry reaches over the roof of the car to scrub at a bit of dried-on sap.  A whole collection of well-defined back muscles flex in unison. When Arya does find out who hired this guy, she's gonna send whoever it was a fruit basket.

 

* * *

All the cars are cleaned by Friday afternoon, and the weekend is quiet.  Arya starts to wonder if Gendry was just some grouchy fever dream, courtesy of her id.  Then it's Monday, and he's back.

 

“I'm still getting paid.” He says by way of explanation.

 

So Arya brainstorms for a while.  Then Gendry helps her replace the hard-to-reach lightbulb in the kitchen.  And re-oil the hinges on the bathroom door. He seems undeniably well-versed with a can of WD-40, so they follow that up by trying to figure out why the fan in the foyer always makes a squeaking noise.  They don't find a definitive answer, but spraying a bunch of WD-40 on the inner fan mechanisms does appear to fix the problem.

 

“You live here by yourself?” Gendry asks her.  He's moved on to fixing the sink. Arya is sitting on the counter and watching, happy as a ceiling fan coated in WD-40.

 

“Only until August.” She says.  Then, after a moment, figures it's okay to admit that “it's a little bit lonely.”

 

“Nice place, though.” Gendry says.  He gives her a frown that's not exactly  _ un _ sympathetic.  Then he asks her to pass him a wrench, because if she's gonna watch him do home repairs, she might as well make herself useful.

 

* * *

It's been two weeks.  There are still no horses.

 

Gendry says he doesn't know what Wall Ball is, so scraping rust stains out of the drains will have to wait.  In the year 2012, Arya’s Wall Ball team went 7-0 in the school tournament.

 

Gendry has a build that is naturally predisposed to be good at Wall Ball.  In more colloquial terms, he's freakishly tall with the limb proportions of a daddy-long-legs.  That means he'll be closely matched against Arya’s agility and propensity for games that involve smacking a kickball really hard.

 

Arya marks down the boundaries on the driveway with chalk.

 

“I'm going to make this a little smaller than regulation size, because I'm not allowed to run for another week.” Arya says, trying to eyeball a zone that will give them a good driveway:wall ratio.

 

“What?” Gendry asks.

 

“That was a joke.  I don't think there's a regulation size, and if there is  _ I _ sure don’t-”

 

“No, I mean, you can't run until next week?”

 

“Oh, yeah.” Arya lifts the hem of her shirt to show off what is now healing into a truly gnarly scar.  “I got stabbed in a McDonalds. Mugging gone wrong.”

 

Gendry looks at the injury with a commiserative eye.  “No way.”

 

“You're literally looking at the stab wound.”

 

“Yeah, how’d you actually get it?”

 

Arya sighs.  “Okay. It was actually at ballet camp.”  She powers through with her explanation as Gendry laughs at her.  “But I  _ did _ get stabbed!  The doctors said I was very lucky that all my internal organs are still intact.”

 

Gendry is still laughing.   _ Internal organs were at risk, Gendry! _

 

She kicks his ass at Wall Ball.

 

* * *

There's a county fair in the neighboring town each summer, but it always falls during the Starks’ summer vacation.  Arya has never seen a demolition derby in real life, but man, is she excited about the concept. She's ready to see some cars without windshields go flying.

 

Gendry never goes anywhere over the summer, yet still has never been to the county fair.  He says he doesn't like people, or livestock, or giant pumpkin competitions. He tells Arya that if she goes to the county fair in her shiny new Chrysler, her car  _ will _ get covered in mud, broken into, probably egged, maybe stolen, and he won't feel even a little bit sorry for her.

 

“You should bring me, then.” Arya says.

 

“Gonna pay me overtime?” Gendry asks.

 

“It'd be pro-bono.” Arya tells him.

 

He brings her anyways.  Arya always assumed Gendry didn't dress up for work. She reevaluates that assumption when he rolls into her driveway on Saturday wearing a shirt so threadbare it's practically transparent.  Clothing deemed indecent for daily casual wear is, apparently, appropriate attire for the county fair.

 

Arya had spent a few minutes longer than usual getting ready, settling on a plaid button-down and jean shorts.  She looks and feels like a girl who'd be sitting on the hood of a pickup truck in the background of a country music video.

 

“You look nice.” Gendry tells her, looking perfectly comfy in his tissue-thin shirt.

 

The demolition derby is, predictably, cool as all hell.  Some guy gets rear-ended so hard his bumper falls off. It rained the night before, so whenever someone really floors it there's a big spray of mud.  That feels right.

 

They buy hot dogs at a stand, piled up with enough fried onions and peppers to get the full fair food effect.  The girl in front of them in line recognizes Gendry. He introduces them to each other as “Mya, from The Vale” and “Arya, my friend from work”.  Arya isn't sure what The Vale is, or how Gendry and Mya are affiliated with it. She supposes she's just lucky she made the cutoff for ‘friend from work’.  She wouldn’t have bounced back so easily from  _ this is Arya, the girl I'm getting paid to hang out with _ .

 

* * *

Dad calls from Braavos to check in.  He tries his very hardest to find things to talk about that don't directly reference how much fun the family is having without her.  Sansa has been learning all sorts of new Braavosi recipes she wants to try out when they get home. They're all taking lots of pictures to show Arya, and how are things back at Winterfell?

 

“I was looking at our payroll spreadsheet,” Dad casually mentions, “and would you believe we've been paying a stablemaster this whole summer?”

 

“Huh.” Arya says, noncommittally.

 

“Hopefully Luwin had this stablemaster doing something besides just sitting in our garage.” Dad knows Arya knows every person who works in Winterfell.  It's nice of him to humor her.

 

“I'm sure he's keeping busy.” Arya says.

 

“Hm.” Dad says, with a noncommittal noise of his own.  He's willing to humor Arya, but only to a certain point.

 

* * *

Arya feels like she should probably be the one to break the news to Gendry.  He takes it well.

 

“It’s not that you've been doing bad work.” She explains.

 

“It's that there's no actual stables?” Gendry guesses.

 

Arya nods.

 

“That's fair.” He says.  “This was getting dangerously close to prostitution.”

 

Arya stares at him.  “I wasn't sleeping with you!”

 

“You're right.  I'm just saying, now you could.  Legally.” He shrugs.

 

Arya gives him a once-over.  She has to admit, he makes a compelling argument.


End file.
